Mero-desh ji,

Namaskar. Thank you so much for relaying your experience. I can relate to what you are saying greatly.

Before my parents left me in the ashram, I was super-ficially religious. What this means is that I had not had any deep debates about God or religion or anything. Like I said in my previous post, I was simply going to my relatives religious functions sometimes. My mother used to take vrata on Tuesdays for Ganeshji.

When I came to America as a young adolescent, I had brought a picture of Ganeshji. I used to offer a 'dhoop' to this picture before going to Middle-school. But beyond that, I had not thought about theology or religion or dharma in any deep way. I didn't need to. I was simply acting as a Nepal who was following rituals and my faith based on how I had seen my relatives do it. I didn't need to think about religion any deeper than that.

My father is a 'devout athiest.' He is a funny man. He takes religion as such a big joke that when there is a religioius discussion going on, he will put all his points in as if agreeing on anything and makes the religious person completely happy. You know this is the way a lot of our discussions go in Nepali social circles. We pat the guest on the back, we say whatever we need to, just to make the person in front of us happy, and we send them home. And then after they leave, we call them an idiot. So my father is like this.

My mother has very strong spiritual callings. She is quite well read for a Nepali woman. I would say my mother is more the intellectual in the family than my father, though my father has a lot more formal education than my mother. It is an interesting paradox.

So in my immediate home we had close to no religious practices. Now that my mother is aging she has more religious practices. But growing up, I didn't feel my parents took religion very seriously. Though I have to say that amongst my relatives, in my grandparents home, there was a lot of religious practice. I have a lot of happy memories of Nepal of running around with my cousins around my mamaghar during festival days. I feel nostalgic for them. I'm sure many of you can relate to this.

Anyway, due to a series of unfortunate (or maybe fortunate, depending on your perspective) events, my parents decided to leave me in the Ashram setting. They would come to pick me up close to three years later in this ashram. It was supposed to be a "harmless experiment." My parents were trying to avoid me going back to Nepal for my SLC. They knew what a b*itch it would be for me to study for it. So the plan was that I was going to finish my education while staying in the ashram in America. It was a means to an end. It was not supposed to be any more than that.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on your perspective) it became a lot more than that. It became one of the most transformative experiences of my life.  Without saying whether it was positive or negative, I will just say that the experiences that I went through in this setting had the biggest change in my person. I'm sure it didn't help that I was a young teenager. My foundation was just building. My identity was just forming. When I walked out of the ashram a few years later, I had changed so much, my parents and siblings didn't know who I was anymore.

As if it wasn't bad enough that I was in America. I was also in an ashram. An ashram secluded from society. Secluded from television. Secluded from newspapers. I would find out about many of the world events that happened in the world only after I came out of the ashram after a few years. Meanwhile, what happened in the ashram, stayed in the ashram.

Believe it or not, I too am very skeptical about the existence of God. I am no blind believer. If you have seen my writing in sajha you will know that I have an analytical mind. I will not accept anything unless I have analyzed it. But the problem is that I can give no other explanation to the powerful experiences that I experienced while in the ashram by any other language than to call it spirituality. And I cannot attribute that spiritual experience to any other 'thing' than God.

Seriously, I have tried. I have tried to logically figure out other alternatives and explanations for the source of my powerful experiences. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on your perspective), I have not been able to find other explanation. So in the absence of any other explanation, I attribute my experiences to spirituality and consequently to God.

If any of you will help me to find an alternative explanation, I would be grateful because it would free me from my beliefs. But first listen to the nature of the powerful experiences I have gone through and judge for yourself.

Can any of you relate to what I am saying? Or have I lost you?

Mero_desh, I know that you can relate to my words because you have gone through the kind of experiences that I have gone through to a certain extent. But in some ways, in terms of intensity, I would say that my experiences are more intense than yours. Of course it is hard to compare what a person feels in their own heart. I am simply trying to put my experiences in context with other people's.

You explain your experience as an absence of worry and negativity. My experience was not simply a cessation of negativity and worry, but rather an overwhelming experience of emotional ecstasy, amongst other things. I hope I can capture what I went through in words, but it will be quite challenging. And no, like you explained also, I was not taking any drugs or hallucinating. There was a co-relation between the activities and spiritual rituals I was practicing and the emotion that I was experiencing.

To tell you the truth, if someone else were to write the words that I have written above, and if I had not gone through what I did, I would blow them off as bakwas. I would roll my eyes at the BS of that person's words. But unfortunately/fortunately it is I who have gone through that experience. And I cannot lie to myself about the truth about my experience just to be popular with others. This has been a very painful experience. And generally I avoid talking about this subject because I no how unpopular it is to talk about these mystical experiences in a world where cold rationality is only discussed in clinical scientific terms with no tolerance for this 'mumbo-jumbo nonsense.'

But what can I do? I cannot lie to myself to make everyone else happy, can I? I suppose I can. But I have chosen not to. Instead, I have chosen to be queit.

Please tell me if anyone can relate to my experiences and I will tell you more.